EL CENTRO – In the 102 years since Imperial County broke away from San Diego County, the area has become synonymous with sand dunes, the shrinking Salton Sea, crops that feed the nation – and a stunning level of unemployment.

Yet in this valley 90 miles east of San Diego, where the air is thick with dust, desert heat and the smells of farming, resilient residents have learned to work with what they have, even when there is not enough work to go around.

“We seem to be hearty down here,” said Sam Couchman, executive director of the Imperial Valley Workforce Development Office, which helps people get jobs. “Maybe that's because we're rural and one of the last pioneering people.”

In 29 of the last 30 months, and 21 running, the Imperial County region has had the nation's highest jobless rate. One out of four people in the county is unemployed – a ratio no other metropolitan area in the United States comes close to matching, according to the latest government data.

San Diego County's jobless rate is 9.3 percent. The state's is 11.5 percent.

A March 3 story in The New York Times labeled El Centro, the Imperial County seat, the “capital city” for the nation's deep recession. The story ricocheted around the area, to the dismay of boosters struggling to diversify the local economy.

“Trust me, I got e-mails from all my old college buddies,” said Carroll Buckley, board president for the El Centro Chamber of Commerce, whose membership fell 9 percent last year as businesses languished or left.

Imperial County is a patchwork of farmland, deserted lots, government buildings and clusters of low-rise homes and commercial buildings. The most common markings of this border territory include for-sale signs, bilingual billboards promoting local banks and beer, and 500,000 acres of fields that yield alfalfa, lettuce and corn.

Residents such as Joe Colace, 54, whose family began farming Imperial Valley in 1948, view the region's unemployment distinction as a fact of life, like triple-digit temperatures in summer.

“That's going to be the crown that we bear for the foreseeable future,” Colace said.

The region's unemployment numbers are part truth, part topography. Skewed data from the U.S. Census Bureau, a migrant labor force and potential fraud might be feeding what Northern Arizona University senior lecturer Gerald Schmaedick has called an “impression of greater economic stagnation than the reality.”

But the reality is rough. Only one in 10 Imperial County residents has a college degree. One in five people lives below the poverty level. The median household income is around $33,500 a year. There are three Super Wal-Marts and four stand-alone Starbucks, 176,000 people and three times as many cows.

Two years ago, the county's property values shot up 20 percent – highest in the state – thanks to a construction and home ownership boom. But nearly one-third of last year's home buyers now owe more on those properties than they're worth, fifth-highest in the nation, according to Forbes.com.

The housing collapse has forced drywall manufacturer U.S. Gypsum to lay off 139 plant workers since last year. Restaurant closures and retail cutbacks have added to the unemployment, despite the arrival of the area's first real mall four years ago.

Even big projects promising hundreds of new local jobs – two state prisons built in the 1990s and a casino that just opened near the Arizona border – hired heavily from outside the county, in part to land more qualified workers.

The work force development office recently fielded 160 applications for two customer service assistant jobs that pay $11.75 an hour. More than 60 of those applicants had two-or four-year college degrees.

Earlier this month, Yadira Salcido, 33, and Karen Pavao, 50, stared at computers a few stations apart in a one-stop employment center that was filling up early with people looking for work.

As Salcido filled out an online application for a job at the IHOP restaurant down the street, she complained that her boss at 7-Eleven doesn't give her enough hours each week. She said she lost her last job at a gas station when her car broke down and she couldn't fix it.

“I know I'll find something soon as long as I don't give up,” she said.

Pavao was laid off in December from an accounting job she had held for five years. She called her job search “the new test.”

Agricultural areas, especially those near the border, such as El Centro and Yuma, consistently show high unemployment rates. El Centro's level rises and falls like clockwork with each turn of a harvest cycle.

There are several reasons for the county's high ranking.

Federal unemployment statistics rely on population data from April 1, 2000, the baseline of the last full census. That date falls in a slack period between Imperial County's winter and spring harvesting employment peaks.

Also, Mexican nationals who legally work in Imperial County can and do receive unemployment benefits if they lose their jobs. They simply need a U.S. mailing address or a post office box. Yet these workers – an unknown number because California's Employment Development Department doesn't track citizenship – are not counted as residents in the base calculation for the unemployment rate because they live in Mexico.

Farmers and a state government spokesman also said there is a problem with agricultural workers abusing the system by illegally collecting unemployment benefits several times a year using multiple Social Security numbers – something farmers say they've unsuccessfully lobbied legislators to address.

And it's possible the rate is skewed because large numbers of people are paid for jobs in cash – and therefore working, even if they don't show up in the employment data – and others are collecting unemployment while working in Mexico, said Bill Watkins, an economist at the University of California Santa Barbara.

At the Imperial Valley Workforce Development Office, Couchman's challenge is now.

Even as it banks on a budget-doubling $6 million boost from the federal stimulus package, his office is trying to make things better in Imperial County.

It's awarding six times the number of general educational development degrees, or GEDs, it did two years ago. It's holding job fairs and training people for the technical jobs of today and tomorrow in equipment repair, nursing and renewable energy, among other areas. It's planting hope.

“There's some real concern here about our unemployment rates, and we work on them constantly to try to improve them,” he said. “But I think there is more furor in the nation than there is locally. We understand it's a bad economy. I think people down here adjust better to it.”